What Phone Surveys Really Say About Media Usage.

Ball State University finds a 164% discrepancy between telephone surveys conducted to find how much time US adults spend watching TV and actual observations conducted of people while they watch TV.

Ball State’s Center for Media Design shadowed 101 adults to monitor their media intake, collected 359 individual media diaries and surveyed 401 people over the phone to see how far off phone surveys are from “reality.”

Specifically, Ball State determined that adults said over the phone that they watch two hours of TV per day, but when they were observed by researchers, they were logged watching five hours and 19 minutes of TV each day. As for the Internet, over the phone adults told researchers they spend 29 minutes per day online, but when actually observed, researchers determined adults spend over an hour each day online.

It is important to note that Ball State surveyed people only in what it terms “Middletown America” — taking the phrase from landmark sociological studies conducted by Robert and Helen Lynd in the 1920s — among people living in Muncie and Delaware County, Indiana.

The researcher observations found that a number of adults made telephone calls, checked e-mail and opened postal mail while they watched TV, but those people keeping diaries tended not to note these few-minute-long instances. BIGresearch reports at least 20% of each age group of US consumers it surveyed in 2003 said they regularly go online while they are watching TV. Many also read mail or the newspaper.

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